News about healthcare and medicine in China | An independent site by Michael Woodhead

Monday, 27 January 2014

Three medical stories from Chinese language media

Chengdu doctors out of pocket as fundraiser fails to deliver

Chengdu neurosurgeons are out of pocket to the tune of 60,000 RMB after they operated on a seriously ill boy whose parents turned to fundraisers to pay the medical bills. The surgeons at the Chengdu Military District Hospital performed an urgent operation on a 9-tear old boy who had inflammation of the cerebral cortex. His parents did not have enough money to pay for the medical bills and they turned to a volunteer fundraiser to help solicit donations. However, at the end of the year the hospital is trying to balance its accounts and has yet to see the funds for the operation. According to the hospital rules, unpaid bills are the responsibility of the doctors who provided the treatment. When contacted by the West China News, the fundraiser Chen Mei said she was waiting for the paperwork to be done so she could process the donations and provide the funds to the doctors.

Girl in Sichuan has duplicate organs

The People's Daily reports the case of a 13-year old girl who has a congenital disorder that has given her double the number of organs of a normal person. The Guangzhou girl called "Tian Tian" was born with four kidneys, two bladders, two uteruses and four Fallopian tubes. The girl had some fusion surgery when she was an infant but now her kidneys are causing her problems. The excessive organs mean that she has to urinate twenty times a day and she has frequent urethral infections. According to the newspaper report, the girl and her parents have now gone to Chengdu to track down the doctors who did the original operations to ask them to amalgamate the kidney
Her treating doctor Hu Xianliang said the operation would not remove the kidneys but would seek to normalise their function. He said Tian Tian was likely the first such case in the world and was caused by abnormal development of a twin ovum.

Chinese children can't exercise in smog

A report in the Guangming Daily looks at the warnings from health experts to parents about not letting their children exercise in smoggy conditions. The report quotes a child health expert from the Sports Ministry saying that children should continue to do physical exercise during smoggy periods of bad air pollution but should exercise indoors and avoid heavy aerobic exercise. The long term health risks of inhaling high amounts of pollution during days of heavy pollution should be weighed against the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, the article says.
Other sports medicine experts have even produced a manual that shows the best indoor programs for sports and activities for children to do when the weather is smoggy.